THE OTHER STUFF

As I begin this post, I am just about 1/5th of the way through David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas. It’s a good novel.Well written. Well reviewed. I’ve read Mitchell before, an earlier novel that I liked more than not. Then I starting putting his novels in a large private category: works that I would like to have read but wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle. There’s an old science fictional concept from the middle of the last century that applies. Books could be reproduced in pill form, and when you took one you would have read the book. You could experience languages, scientific concepts, sexual experiences, anything, in this manner.

I was drawn to tackle Mitchell’s novel after having experienced, several times actually, both in a movie theater and on Blu-ray at home, the Wachowskis’ and Tom Tykwer’s movie Cloud Atlas, which I found an easy pill to swallow indeed.Will I pull back from the novel and stick the rest of it in that private category? Perhaps. Not sure yet. My probable path will be to continue on, a bit at a time, until I reach the end of its 509 pages. It impresses, but it simply is not as much fun as the movie. The carrot is that I will watch the movie again once I have finished the novel.

With my childhood spent during WW2 and my adolescence during the Cold War of the 1950s, living with The Bomb when people took it seriously, I was programmed to expect that the end was, in fact, coming.